Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men.

The name of the game in America is banks and power. And one does not have to investigate too far to discover that the Western economy has been built on the backs of non-white people.

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and sometimes, discerned.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world, it is better than bombing one out of it.

Know from whence you came because if you know from whence you came, there is no limit to where you can go.

No one in the city, except your immediate family — not always they— says good morning.

Every day in the city, on the contrary — and I grew up in the city — involves a subtle divorce from reality. There is something a little terrifying about being forty stories in the air and looking around you, and you see nothing but walls, other skyscrapers, and you don't dare look down. And if you are on the ground, if you want to see the sky, you must make an effort of the will and look up. And if you do that, you are likely to be carried off to Bellevue — but that is another story.